What the Dickens, Miss Havisham... you look ravishing!

The Great Expectations recluse as you’ve never seen her before – alongside Bleak House’s Inspector Bucket and Oliver’s Bill Sikes in BBC drama with a bizarre Twist

FOR generations of readers of Great Expectations, she’s the embittered, lonely spinster who was jilted at the altar.

But now Miss Havisham is being portrayed for the first time as a beautiful woman in her prime, filled with anticipation before her wedding day.

Played by Tuppence Middleton, the youthful Miss Havisham is just one of the many characters picked from different Charles Dickens novels who will now inhabit the same story for a lavish new BBC drama.

The 20-part murder mystery called Dickensian reimagines people, plots and places from the author’s classics including Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Bleak House and Great Expectations.

The characters in the drama are all well known but the situations they find themselves in are entirely new.

Dickensian is the brainchild of Tony Jordan, writer of EastEnders and Hustle, and the show’s producers have described it as an original story inspired by Dickens and ‘packed with romance, scandal and intrigue’.

Simon Callow, who has previously starred as Dickens on the West End stage, last night described the idea as ‘brilliant’.

‘G.K. Chesterton once said that almost all of the Dickens characters could be in each other’s novels,’ he added.

And Andrew Davies, who wrote acclaimed adaptations of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, said: ‘My only problem with it is that I wish I’d thought of it first. I can’t wait to meet Miss Havisham before she was an embittered old witch.’

The drama – which begins on BBC1 at Christmas – will unfold on a massive set featuring 27 of Dickens’s most iconic locations, including The Three Cripples Inn from Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop.